(upbeat music)

Meepelous: Hello and welcome, my name is Meepelous (they/he/she)!

And today’s pick is Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant by Kazuto Tatsuta. This Sienen manga was originally published as three volumes between 2013 and 2015, it was subsequently translated by Stephen Paul and published as a combined and flipped volume by Kodansha in 2017.

Content Notes for radiation, smoking and smoking rooms, as well as man camps.

Kodansha has rated this title teen.

A very niche read, I ended up picking this mammoth volume up for a number of reasons including my interests in things Nuclear, the experience of workers, and it’s niche nature also coming across as kind of novel.

Keywords that came to mind reading this volume: diagrams, workplace slice-of-life, power of the future, and bad job markets.

The summary is “On March 11, 2011, Japan suffered the largest earthquake in its modern history. The 9.0-magnitude quake threw up a devastating tsunami that wiped away entire towns, and caused, in the months afterward, three nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. Altogether, it was the costliest natural disaster in human history.
This is not the story of that disaster.
This is the story of a man who took a job. Kazuto Tatsuta was an amateur artist who signed onto the dangerous task of cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, which the workers came to call “Ichi-F.” This is the story of that challenging work, of the trials faced by the local citizens, and of the unique camaraderie that built up between the mostly blue-collar workers who had to face the devious and invisible threat of radiation on a daily basis. After six months, Tatsuta’s body had absorbed the maximum annual dose of radiation allowed by regulations, and he was forced to take a break from the work crew, giving him the time to create this unprecedented, unauthorized, award-winning view of daily life at Fukushima Daiichi.” and the back of the book also includes a quote from the mangaka themselves “I drew this manga because I wanted people to see what day-to-day life at the nuclear power plant is like. Because I believe that’s essential to the future of our country.”

A book based around the mangaka’s own experience, Tatsuta is a penname adopted to try and protect his anonymity and ability to return to Fukushima. Tatsuta also went to some great lengths in interviews to cover his face to those same ends. So, not a whole lot of super personal information is available.

Looking at the writing side of things otherwise, Tatsuta gets into a lot of minutia, makes good use of diagrams, and does an interesting job of juxta positioning all the context of destruction and nuclear apocalypse with the mundanity of the day-to-day of working and living on-site. Scrolling through reviews, there appears to be a lot of praise for Tatsuta’s seeming neutrality… I’m not entirely convinced. I certainly come to the text with my own set of biases, but I felt like Tatsuta downplays the dangers – at least a little.

Art wise it felt fairly standard for a sienen manga. For better or worse.

Looking at the intersecting identities, as I always do…

Class felt the most explored. Because while I do feel like Tatsuta downplays the dangers of his chosen work, he is fairly up front about how the pay structures screw people over and the kind of bad job markets that lead him and many other people to this particular line of work. Not to mention the often sub-par living conditions, the stigma against people feared unclean, the ingenuity of the working class etc. etc. The use of robots to clean up rubble, and the need of more robots to watch the cleaner robots, was interesting.

Place similarly does take up a substantial amount of the book. Not only depictions of what rubble that remains, but also the life (wild and otherwise), and what remains of the local music scene.

And while I think disability could have been explored to a much greater extent, you cannot say that Tatsuta does not take at least some interest in bodies. The sweaty dance of PPE and trying to live and work in it. The shape and pattern of medical oversight. And, as a previous reader marked in the margins of my library book, there’s a surprising number of apparently left handed people in this book.

As far as gender and sexuality goes, this is apparently a heterosexual man’s world. Not the worst I’ve read by far, but very one note. Race even more so.

Wrapping things up, as I mentioned at the start I have been reading a fair amount about Nuclear in the last little while – albeit so far exclusively of the bomb kind. If you are similarly interested check out my previous reviews of Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, my initial thoughts review of Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima, or Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. Recommendations of further reading, as always, are highly appreciated.

With all its pluses and minuses I can’t really give Ichi-F a higher then three out of five rating. For all it is an impressive feat, it’s also a bit of a slog to get through.

Bye y’all, keep reading and stand with striking workers.

And Literally Graphic is created on land that should be given back to the traditional land holders, which in this case is to my knowledge the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, an Anishinaabe people, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Huron-Wendat nation.